Zach Laidlaw is one challenge away from making the grand finale on season three of “Next Level Chef.”
The cooking challenge for the five remaining chefs in Thursday’s reality TV competition called for them to showcase kombucha, a trendy East Asian fermented black tea, in their dish.
Based on their performances on the previous episode, Laidlaw, a professional chef who trained at Elgin Community College, and Izahya Thomas, a social media chef from Miami, worked from the basement kitchen with inferior equipment and picked-over ingredients.
Laidlaw chose a John Dory white fish, something he said he’d not previously prepared. He served it with risotto, ginger and lemon and incorporated kombucha flavors into the dish in four ways.
Chef Richard Blais, who judges the competitors with fellow celebrity chefs Gordon Ramsay and Nyesha Arrington, described Laidlaw’s creation cerebral and a “wonderland of contrasts.”
Laidlaw’s floormate did not fare as well. Thomas’ glazed chicken and fried rice made in a wok was found to be lacking in flavor and poor enough to send him into the elmination cook-off, where he faced fellow Floridian, social media chef Jordan Torrey.
Torrey ended up in the elimination round with his flank steak with arborio rice, which the judges called half-finished and lacking any taste of kombucha.
For the cook-off, the two men had to prepare something in a wok. Thomas made a steak pad Thai to compete against Torrey’s ground pork loin chow mein with a Sriracha and lime sauce.
Thomas lost and was eliminated from the Fox show. However, Ramsay offered Thomas the chance to spend time with him at his Miami restaurants because he said he could relate to Thomas’ decision to become a chef after suffering a sports injury — just as Ramsay had done himself at the start of his career.
In the semifinal round next week, Laidlaw will vie against Christina Miros, a home chef from New Jersey, and Gabi Chappel, a social media chef from Brooklyn who made the show’s top kombucha dish.
Chappel’s prize for the best entry was a token that she can use to give herself a 10-second head start on gathering ingredients in the next competition or to cut 10 seconds off the selection time of a competitor.
Gloria Casas is a freelance reporter for The Courier-News.
